Description
Russia’s foremost modernist master in a major new translation
Peter France—who has been brilliantly translating Mandelstam’s work for decades—draws heavily from Mandelstam’s later poetry written in Voronezh, while also including poems across the whole arc of the poet’s tragically short life, from his early, symbolist work to the haunting elegies of old Petersburg to his defiant “Stalin poem.” A selection of Mandelstam’s prose irradiates the poetry with warmth and insight as he thinks back on his Petersburg childhood and contemplates his Jewish heritage, the sunlit qualities of Hellenism, Dante’s Tuscany, and the centrality of poetry in society.
Reviews
"It seems almost impossible to pay adequate homage to the poetic genius and personal courage of Osip Mandelstam, manifested during a time in the Soviet Union of tyrannical repression and terror. These spirited and meticulous versions drawn from his poetry and prose, however, by the masterful translator Peter France, bring us considerably closer to achieving that goal. They attest to the extraordinary range and depth of Mandelstam’s complex artistic sensibility and intellect. Let us, simply enough, gratefully welcome them." — Michael Palmer
"Where Mandelstam the uprooted Jew and Mandelstam the would-be Hellene meet is in the attempt to wrest culture from disruption and to make a home from chaos." — Clare Cavanagh, "Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition"
"Marvelous and heartrending..." — Vladimir Nabokov
"The greatest twentieth-century stylist in Russian." — Guy Davenport
"In Black Earth, Peter France has made all the right choices.....[His] approach has yielded outstanding results, conveying Mandelstam’s density with an elegance that brings pleasure from the whole, even before the reader fully digests the parts. Much of the future-oriented poetry of Mandelstam’s contemporaries now sounds hopelessly dated; Mandelstam’s poetry, meanwhile, flourished with the passage of time." — Sophie Pinkham, Poetry Foundation
"Black Earth brings me closer to Mandelstam the poet than to Mandelstam the mythic figure, and his “ancient language” is rendered into real contemporary poetry in English that succeeds in speaking eloquently to the inner eye and ear. This is all to the good." — J. Kates, Arts Fuse
"In Peter France’s elegant translation, English readers can access not only Mandelstam’s formidable ideas and images but also something of his rhythm, rhyme and sound-play.... This book is a portrait of a life crushed by history. But it testifies, too, to the persistence of spirit." — Alexander Wells, Exberliner
"With Black Earth: Selected poems and prose, Peter France, a veteran translator of French and Russian, has provided the first edition that consistently reflects the sound, sense – and resistance to sense – of Mandelstam’s poems and lyric prose." — Benjamin Paloff, Times Literary Supplement
Also By: Osip Mandelstam 
Poems of Osip Mandelstam
Paperback, 2014
Proudly part of the New Directions Poetry Pamphlets, a collection of Russian masterpieces
Also By: Peter France
Time of Gratitude
Paperback, 2017
A collection of extraordinary essays by one of the seminal Russian poets of the twentieth century
Time of Gratitude
E Book, 2017
A collection of extraordinary essays by one of the seminal Russian poets of the twentieth centuryPoems of Osip Mandelstam
Paperback, 2014
Proudly part of the New Directions Poetry Pamphlets, a collection of Russian masterpieces
